Sussex R., Cubberley P. The Slavic Languages

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(202b) Blg Iva

n go nja

Ivan he-Encl-Acc Neg-be/have

‘Ivan’s not (here)’

(202c) Blg Iva

n (go) vı

ˇzdam

Ivan (he-Encl-Acc) see-1SgPres

‘I see Ivan’

In this way the typical flexibility of Slavic word order is maintained without a loss

of clarity of the marking of grammatical relations.

The relative order of the main constituents may also vary in sentences consisting

of a subject and a verb. Sentences with intransitive verbs do not show a uniform

SV order. The subject usually precedes the verb if it is an agent or a ‘‘performer’’ of

an action, and the verb is semantically ‘‘strong’’ (i.e. not a copula or semi-copula,

inchoative, etc.):

(203a) Ukr divc

ta spiva

jut

‘the girls are singing’

(203b) Ukr vı

ndo

bre malju

je ‘he paints well’

though even here we can find differences between the unmarked order for similar

expressions in different languages:

(204a) B/C/S su

nce se r

odilo ‘the sun has risen’

(204b) Ukr zijs

nce ‘the sun has risen’

But there are expressions where the subject is not an agent, and the verb is

semantically ‘‘weak’’ (that is, it expresses the onset, continuation or unmarked

natural activity of the subject). Such expressions, with their reduced concept of

agency, often involve phenomena of nature, and usually occur in the VS order:

(205a) Ukr synı

je ne

bo ‘the sky is blue’ (synı

ty ‘to be blue’)

(205b) Rus nastupı

la vesna

‘spring has come’

(205c) Pol wieje wiatr ‘the wind is blowing’

This apparently inverted order is simply explained by reference to the pragmatics of

information structure in the sentence (7.5): the semantically and informationally

heavy constituent comes last.

Impersonal constructions contain no grammatical subject, and follow the VO or

Verb + Complement order:

(206a) Rus ne sly

no slo

v [GenPl] ‘no words can be heard’ (lit. ‘not (are)

audible words’)

7.4 Word order 409

(206b) Pol zdecydowano wbudowac

nowa˛ szkołe˛

‘it has been decided to build a new school’

But impersonal constructions with logical subjects, most commonly as the ‘‘dative

of the experiencer’’, prefer the Dative–Verb order:

(207a) Cz na

muˇz se chce dom

to_us already ReflCl want-3Sg to_home

‘we already feel like (going) home’

(207b) Rus na

m ø nu ˇzna

sekreta

-a

to_us (be) necessary-FemSg secretary-NomSg

‘we need a secretary’

(207c) Rus na

mø nu

ˇzno sekreta

-u

to_us (be) necessary-Neut ¼ Impers secretary-AccSg

‘we need a secretary’

Neutral VS order may also occur with existential and predicative constructions.

Positive existentials are personal constructions, while negative existentials are

impersonal. Both types place the ‘be’ first in the neutral order:

(208a) Rus e

gde

side

‘there is somewhere to sit’

(208b) B/C/S nı

je [‘not is’] bra%s

na ‘there is no flour’

But a locative expression usually precedes the existential ‘be’:

(208c) Sorb w konsumje njeje była butra ‘there was no butter in the shop’

The same word order applies with existential verbs other than ‘be’:

(208d) B/C/S od t

ebe ne

ostalo tra

ga ‘there was no trace of you left’

Predicatives are more variable. Predicative adjectives regularly follow the copula-

tive verb in neutral order, whatever the form of the adjective (long/short, nomina-

tive/instrumental, definite/indefinite):

(209a) Slk dolina je u

zka [Short] ‘the valley is narrow’

(209b) Slk t’a ˇzky

ˇzivot je hoden [Short] viac ne ˇz nic

‘A hard life is better (lit. ‘worth more’) than nothing’

(209c) Rus o

nby

l togda

molody

m [Long: Instr] ‘he was young then’

(209d) B/C/S o

njedo%bar [Indef Short] ‘he is good’

(209e) B/C/S o

njemo

jsta

[Def Long] prı%jatelj ‘he is my old friend’

410 7. Sentence structure

Predicative nominals usually follow the copula, especially when in the nominative

case. If there is no case-marking of the predicate, like that provided by the instru-

mental case, the subject is identified by the word order Subject–Copula–Predicate:

(210a) Sorb Jan je wuc

er ‘Jan is a teacher’

(210b) Rus Moskva

– stolı

ca Rossı

i ‘Moscow (is) the capital of Russia’

If the predicate occurs in the instrumental, however, it may precede the copula,

especially if the subject is long and/or syntactically complex:

(210c) Rus pric

n-oj vzry

v-a by

cause-InstrSg explosion-GenSg was-MascSg

nedosta

tok vody

, koto

r-aja ...

lack[Masc]-NomSg water[Fem]-GenSg which-NomFemSg

‘the cause of the explosion was the lack of water, which ...’

7.4.3.2 Modifiers

The order of modifiers and heads depends mainly on the syntactic type of the

modifier and on its internal composition. Sentence modifiers like sentence adverbs

(‘probably’, ‘perhaps’), and place and time adverbs (‘here’, ‘today’) show the

greatest mobility, occurring in sentence-initial and sentence-final position as

well as within the verb phrase. But modifiers of individual constituents are

more restricted in their movement, and tend to be located next to their head

constituents. Modifiers consisting of a whole sentence, like relative clauses, follow

their heads:

(211a) Blg Smı

rnenski e poe

t, c

ˇie

to tvo

ˇestvo

te o

stane zavı

nagi

v zla

tnija fo

nd na na

ata literatu

‘Smirnenski is a poet whose work will remain forever

in the golden treasury of our literature’

Modifiers consisting of noun phrases and prepositional phrases also follow their

heads:

(211b) Sorb c

łowjek z rozumom ‘a man of [with] intelligence’

(211c) Sorb rozumny c

łowjek ‘an intelligent man’

unless they themselves modify an adjective, usually an attributive, or a participle in

an expanded participial construction. In these instances the modifier(s) may precede:

(212a) Pol jego ze wszystkich wzgle˛do

w udana symfonia

lit. ‘his from all points of view successful symphony’

7.4 Word order 411

(212b) Rus vse

´`

eti na

m neizve

stnye fa

kty

lit. ‘all these to us unknown facts’

(212c) Rus vse

´`

eti neizve

stnye na

m fa

kty

lit. ‘all these unknown to us facts’

(212d) Rus vse

´`

eti na

imi kolle

gami vy

brannye akade

miki

lit. ‘all these by our colleagues chosen academicians’

Among adjectives and degree modifiers we find that single constituent adjective

modifiers and degree modifiers tend to precede the head (213a, c), while complex

adjective modifiers and degree modifiers, and other modifiers, tend to follow the

head (213b, d):

(213a) Rus tepe

r-es

-njaja Moskva

now-Adj-FemNomSg Moscow[Fem]-NomSg

(213b) Rus Moskva

tepe

Moscow[Fem]-NomSg now[Adv]

‘contemporary Moscow’

(213c) Cz c

ˇernovlask-a

holk-a

black-haired-FemNomSg girl-NomSg

(213d) Cz holk-a s c

ern-y

mi vlas-y

girl-NomSg with black-InstrPl hair-InstrPl

‘black-haired girl, girl with black hair’

Attributive adjectives provide an example of fixed ordering which differs signifi-

cantly among the Slavic languages. In all the languages except Polish, single

modifiers usually precede (Adjective + Noun, as in (214a–b) ), except in some

fixed phrases (Noun + Adjective, as in (215a) ), and in some terminological, tech-

nical and fixed combinations of nouns and adjectives, which have often been

calqued (9.6.2) from Latin or Greek (215b–c):

(214a) Sorb sł o

ny dz

´en

, mo

dre njebjo ‘sunny day, blue sky’

(214b) Cz dobry

den, c

esky

lid ‘good day, Czech people’

(215a) Sorb Wo

e Nas

‘Our Father’

Mac

ica Serbska ‘Sorbian Mac

ica’

(215b) Rus Pe

tr Velı

kij/Pe

rvyj ‘Peter the Great/First’

mja prilaga

tel

noe ‘adjective’ (Lat nomen adjectivum)

(215c) Cz U

stav pro jazyk c

esky

‘Institute of the Czech language’

412 7. Sentence structure

Polish is a special case, since some adjectives regularly follow the noun, while others

precede:

(216a) Pol czerwony plastyk syntetyczny ‘red synthetic plastic’

cf. (216b) Rus kra

snaja sintetı

eskaja plastma

ssa

(217a) Pol nowa gramatyka opisowa ‘a new descriptive grammar’

cf. (217b) Rus no

vaja opisa

tel

naja gramma

tika

The adjective that follows the noun in Polish is the one which occurs latest before

the noun in the English and Russian equivalents. In general, qualitative adjectives

(6.1.2.1) will precede the noun, except in a few fixed expressions or in emphatic

constructions:

(218) Pol dzien

dobry, cf. Cz dobry

den, Rus do

bryj de

‘good day’

Relative adjectives in Polish follow the noun. If there are two relative adjectives, the

adjective closer to the noun in the corresponding sentence in a pre-modifying

language will be the adjective to follow the noun in Polish (219a–b); if there are

more than two adjectives, one will remain after the noun, and the others will stack

before the noun (219c):

(219a) Pol pompa elektryczna ‘an electric pump’

(219b) Pol elektryczna pompa wodna ‘an electric water-pump’

(219c) Pol dobry polski słownik etymologiczny

‘a good Polish etymological dictionary’

Polish is therefore a language with selectively post-modifying attributive adjectives,

and is an intermediate stage between pre-modifying languages like the other ten

modern Slavic languages and English, and a predominantly post-modifying lan-

guage like French.

Slavic adjectives, except in fixed expressions, usually invert around their noun

head for the purposes of emphasis. What is emphasized depends on the position of

the noun phrase in the sentence. An inversion which places a noun or adjective in

sentence-initial or sentence-final position will focus or emphasize that noun or

adjective. The same effect can be achieved phonetically or lexico-grammatically by

emphasizing individual constituents in otherwise regular word orders. Inversions

are particularly common in poetry, and in rhetorical or artistic prose:

(220a) Rus Bro ˇzu

li ja

vdo

lic s

umnyx (Pushkin)

wander-1Sg Q I along streets noisy

‘If I’m wandering down noisy streets’

7.4 Word order 413

(220b) Rus godu

vty

sjac

ˇa

devjat

tso

rok devja

tom

year-LocSg in thousand nine hundred forty ninth

napa

li my

s druz

mi na primec

ˇa

tel

nuju

came upon we with friends on remarkable

zame

tku v ˇzurna

le <Priro

da> Akade

mii Nau

notice in journal <Nature> of the Academy of Sciences

‘about 1949 my friends and I came across a remarkable notice

in the journal Nature of the Academy of Sciences.’

(A. I. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag archipelago,p.1)

7.4.3.3 Clitics

Slavic languages show considerable differences in their repertoires of clitics

(6.1.2.4). Enclitics are usually associated with the first (‘‘Wackernagel’’) unaccented

position in the sentence (usually second position). Enclitics attach themselves to the

preceding stressed constituent, and so do not themselves bear any stress. The

constituent to which they are attached is often called the ‘‘host’’ (Zwicky, 1977).

Proclitics, for instance prepositions, attach to a following host. But there are major

difficulties in distinguishing between enclitics and proclitics in sentence-second

position. In particular, phonological hosts may not coincide with grammatical

hosts for a given clitic (van Riemsdijk, 1999: 15). For this reason we use ‘clitic’ in

the following examples except where proclitics and enclitics are explicitly discussed

(and for Slavic clitics see Dimitrova-Vulchanova, 1999):

(221a) B/C/S d

eca bi nam se sm

ejala

children CondCl us-Cl-Dat ReflCl laughed

‘the children would laugh at us’

(221b) Blg vc

ˇe

ra sa˘m go nabljuda

val

yesterday AuxCl-1Sg he-Cl-Acc watched

‘yesterday I watched him’

(221c) Slk nesmial by som sa mu

not-laugh CondCl AuxCl-1Sg ReflCl he-Cl-Dat

‘I wouldn’t laugh at him’ (smiat’ sa ‘to laugh’)

(221d) Sln tı

si si ju ku

pil

you AuxCl-2Sg ReflCl-Dat it-Cl-Acc bought

‘you bought it for yourself’

(221e) Cz a-bych neve

ˇdeˇl

in-order-that-AuxCl-1Sg not-know

‘so that I should not know’

414 7. Sentence structure

But in some emphatic constructions, and commonly in B/C/S, the ‘‘host’’ is inter-

preted more narrowly to mean the first non-clitic constituent within the first major

constituent of the sentence. This means that clitics may occur between an attribu-

tive adjective and its head noun (222a) or even between a forename name and a

surname (222b) (Browne, 1974):

(222a) B/C/S usl



enskom se j

eziku g

ovor [...]

in Slovenian ReflCl-Acc language say [...]

‘In Slovenian they say [...]’

(222b) B/C/S La%vbi te se T

olstoj

Lev CondCl you-Cl-Dat ReflCl-Acc Tolstoj

sı%g



urno u

plas

certainly feared

‘Lev Tolstoj would certainly be afraid of you’

Sentence enclitics occur in the first unaccented position in the sentence, and seman-

tically can focus their host. Word order can then be used to place in sentence-initial

position the constituent which is to be focused:

(223a) Rus Iva

n li zna

lob

etom?

Ivan QEncl knew about this

‘was it Ivan who knew about this?’

(223b) Rus ob

etom li zna

l Iva

about this QEncl knew Ivan

‘was it about this that Ivan knew?’

But to some extent in Czech, and particularly in Polish, we find that the clitic verbal

auxiliaries are now closer to being mobile verbal affixes, and may also occur within

the sentence in a number of non-Wackernagel positions. They may attach to

constituents like the object (224a) as well as to the verb (224b–c):

(224a) Pol ksia˛z

ke˛-s

wzia˛ł w bibliotece?

book[Fem]AccSg-Cl-2Sg took-MascSgPast in library

‘did you borrow a book from the library?’

(224b) Pol ksia˛z

ke˛ wzia˛ł-es

w bibliotece?

(224c) Pol

ksia˛z

ke˛ w bibliotece wzia˛ł-es

Conversely, ‘be’ auxiliaries and ‘be’ copulae can attach to adjectives and other

constituents as well:

(225) Pol ja-m Peruwianka˛ jest

I-Cl-1Sg Peruvian[Fem]-InstrSg be-3Sg

‘I am a Peruvian woman’

7.4 Word order 415

– though the standard prefers (ja) jestem. Other Slavic languages show a similar,

though less extreme, vacillation with the conditional by, particularly if it is invari-

ant, and with verbal auxiliaries. If the clitic does not occur in the Wackernagel

position, it usually follows the verb:

(226a) Rus Sa

a prie

xal by po

sle obe

‘Sasha [Masc] would have come after dinner’

B/C/S



ego%din



eta

jpe`` sn



ik napı

sao mi je knj ı%gu [PronCl] [AuxCl]

‘this year that poet wrote me a book’ (Browne, 1994: 41)

There is little variation of this basic pattern within the languages, except for

syntactic (not stylistic) reasons. In Polish, for example, a subordinate sentence

containing a reflexive infinitive may ‘‘promote’’ the reflexive clitic (i.e. move it

leftwards) in the main clause; consider the positions of the reflexive sie˛ in (140–141).

In Bulgarian a negative may attract the verbal auxiliary to it:

(227) Blg ne si li go vı

ˇzdal?

Neg Aux-Cl-2Sg Q-Encl him-Cl saw-MascSgPastPart

‘didn’t you see him?’

while in Slovenian the negative may carry the conditional particle to the rightmost

end of the string of clitics:

(228) Sln Marı

ja jo ne bi vı

dela

Maria her-Cl NegCl CondCl saw-FemSgPastPart

‘Maria would not see her’

The status of some clitics can be affected by the behavior of the host: in Slovenian a

preceding subordinate sentence counts as a first accented constituent, and the

clitics in the main sentence are sentence-initial (de Bray, 1980b: 395):

(229) Sln k

ojeLa

vdon oble

gal Be

ograd,

ga pr

vic

odlikova

lvvo

jski

se je

ReflCl-Acc Aux-Cl-3Sg

‘when Lavdon was besieging Belgrade, Vega first

distinguished himself in the war’

Alternatively, as happens in Sorbian, verbal auxiliary clitics and even pronoun

clitics may occur sentence-initially. This is particularly true of pronouns:

(230a) Sorb mi so dz

ije

I-Cl-Dat ReflCl-Acc dream-3SgPres

‘I dream’

416 7. Sentence structure

(230b) Sorb mi je so dz

´a

ło

I-ClDat Aux-Cl-3Sg Refl-Cl-Acc dream-NeutSgPast

‘I dreamed’

7.5 Syntactic pragmatics: Functional Sentence Perspective

Functional Sentence Perspective is very much a product of the Czech grammatical

tradition (Cz aktua

lnı

lene

nı

tne

, Rus aktua

noe c

lene

nie predlo ˇze

nija

(Mathesius, 1929)). It describes the organization of information in the sentence in

grammatical terms (Huddleston and Pullum, 2002: ch. 16). Here we give only a

broad-scale description of how Slavic handles information with special reference to

word order and grammatical markers.

The ‘‘topic’’ or ‘‘theme’’ is the part of the sentence about which something is said,

and broadly corresponds to the ‘‘old’’ or ‘‘given’’ information from the physical

context of utterance, or from the preceding discourse or text. The new information

presented about the topic is termed the ‘‘comment’’ or ‘‘rheme’’. As a matter of

conversational and communicative strategy, the old information usually comes

first, and is the less informative part of the sentence. The new information, the more

informative part, then follows:

(231a) Rus sta

roe de

revo [NeutSg] stoı

t v bol

m sadu

[MascSg]

‘the old tree stands in a big garden’

The next sentence may make another comment about the same topic:

(231b) Rus ono

[NeutSg] (ø) gora

zdo vy

ena

ej s

ly [FemSg]

‘it (the tree) is much higher than our school’

or it may take information from the previous comment, which now counts as

known information, and supply some new information concerning it:

(231c) Rus o

n [MascSg] prinadle ˇzı

tna

ej s

‘it (the garden) belongs to our school’

The topic in these sentences is expressed by the grammatical subject. But the object,

or a prepositional phrase, or other syntactic elements of the sentence, may also be

the topic, as is clear if we read (231d) or (231e) as following (231a):

7.5 Syntactic pragmatics 417

(231d) Rus

eto de

revo my

vı

deli v pe

rvyj ra

z ...

‘this tree we saw for the first time ...’

(231e) Rus v

etom de

reve ˇza

voronki stro

jat gnezdo

ˇzdyj go

‘in this tree the larks build their nest every year’

There is a tendency for heavier constituents – those with more complex structure,

or more lexical material, or both – to constitute the comment and to come late in

the sentence.

Some sentences may consist entirely of a comment, especially if the sentence is

impersonal or apersonal (personal with no expressed subject):

(232a) Rus by

lo proxla

dno

be-3SgNeutPast chilly-NeutSg

‘it was chilly’

(232b) Rus poju

t gro

mko na u

licax

sing-3PlPres loudly on street-LocPl

‘people are singing loudly in the streets’

By marking given information as it does, word order is also able to compensate for

the lack of a morphological category of article in all the Slavic languages except

Bulgarian and Macedonian (7.1.1). The topic normally precedes the comment; the

topic, being known information, is definite, and this is, in fact, one of the principal

means of marking definiteness in Slavic by non-lexical means. Conversely, noun

phrases in the comment will tend to be indefinite and so will be translated in English

by the indefinite article:

(233a) Pol dziewczynka dała mi bukiet

girl[Fem]-NomSg give-FemSgPast I-Dat bouquet-AccPl

kwiato

flowers-GenPl

‘the girl gave me a bouquet of flowers’

The versatility of this device is shown by the ability of the reverse word order to

assign the reverse markings for definiteness:

(233b) Pol bukiet kwiato

wdała mi dziewczynka

‘the bouquet of flowers was given to me by a girl’

‘it was a girl who gave me the bouquet of flowers’

418 7. Sentence structure